League of Legends lag and high ping: causes and fixes

League of Legends tells you when it lags: champions stutter, skillshots land late and the "attempting to reconnect" banner shows up. Here's how to see what your connection is doing, where League's lag comes from, and what helps.

How League connects you

Riot runs League's servers itself and carries much of the traffic to them on its own network, Riot Direct, built so players' traffic spends less of its trip on the open internet. Each region plays in one place: everyone on EUW, for example, plays in Amsterdam.

That makes your ping mostly a question of two things: how far you are from your region's data centre, and how directly your provider hands your traffic to Riot's network. The first you can't change. The second is where players in the same city end up with different pings.

If you play on EUW, League of Legends EUW ping goes into that region's route in detail.

See your ping in the game

Press Ctrl + F in a game to show your ping and frame rate in the corner. Watch them over a whole game, not just at the start:

• High but steady: distance or a long route. You'll feel a constant delay on every click.
• Normal with jumps: something on the way is queueing, often on your own line or Wi-Fi, sometimes your provider's busy hours. What causes ping spikes shows how to tell which.
• Steady ping, but champions stutter: packet loss. Some of what the server sends never arrives, and the game has to guess.
• Steady ping, low frame rate in fights: that's your PC, not the network.

What helps

1. Play on a cable. League needs little bandwidth but hates uneven delivery; Wi-Fi's jitter shows up as stutter. Wi-Fi or Ethernet explains.
2. Keep the line quiet during games: uploads, cloud backups and big downloads elsewhere in the home.
3. Close what you don't need on the PC. A browser full of video and a launcher patching another game add up.
4. Check the time of day. Lag that comes every evening and leaves at night is your provider's busy hours, not your PC.
5. Change the route when your ping is higher than the distance to your region explains. That's the road to Riot's network, the part none of your settings reach.

What doesn't help: a faster plan, DNS changes (they don't touch the route a game takes once it's connected), and most "ping reducer" tweaks.

Where NoSpike fits

NoSpike's general League of Legends entry is a beta: its servers are still being mapped, so NoSpike may not carry all of a game's traffic yet. While you play, League's page in the app says what it carries. EUW is mapped and verified, and has its own page.

Where NoSpike does carry League, it measures your own route and the routes through its relays in Europe, and routes the game only when a relay is faster. It checks every minute, doesn't move you in the middle of a game unless the route fails, and says so when your own route is already best.